Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G) has become the first Bollywood film to reach number three in the British box-office charts when it took Pounds 473,255 in its first week in the run up to Christmas. Indian films have come of age in the West. Three years ago, when Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (a flop in India) opened opposite Saving Private Ryan at London’s Cineworld, nobody expected Spielberg’s blockbuster war epic to take a back seat. It did. Dil Se became the first Indian film to break into the crucial top-10 list of the UK box-office charts. It played to sell-out audiences five times a day, with British Asians paying between Rs 600-900 per ticket. K3G is said to be the most expensive Indian film ever made, with a budget of Rs 41 crore and an unprecedented cast of the top three male actors in India. Three other recent films have also been important in promoting Indian films Lagaan which won the audience award at the 54th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland; Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding which won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice festival making her the first woman winner ever, and finally, Asoka which also won praise in Venice this August. Several factors are responsible for this renaissance: the increasing affluence of British Asians, the power of the “brown pound”, a crackdown on pirated videos by bodies like the Federation Against Copyright Theft and the Government of India’s move to make export earnings from cinema and television tax-free in 1998. Indian films and music have always been enormously influential in the former Soviet Union, West Asia, Iran and Iraq. In Afghanistan, Satinder Bindra, Delhi bureau chief of CNN, writing in Asian Age last week confesses that his unparalleled access to senior figures in the Northern Alliance while covering the bombing of the Taliban was based on their fondness for Indian films! Directors like Shekhar Kapur, Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have done well in the West. Similar success stories exist in theatre — British Asian theatre companies like Tamasha and Tara Arts have translated their plays into English and gained loyal support from English theatre-goers. Sudha Bhuchar, co-founder of Tamasha, says that 60 per cent of the audience for their play Balti Kings was non-Asian a trend that followed the success of their film East is East.